hi,

i'm looking foward to respray my white cobalt sedan. i would paint the hood, roof, trunk and maybe door handles, drum brake/caliper orange (with clear coat) the rest of the car would be matte black. i never painted a car myself before. any tips on how to do this ?

 

Please no...

 

Walmart sells cans of paint for a dollar I believe. Post up pics after your done

 

Clear out your entire garage if you have one. If not, youre already screwed. Install a heater, air conditioner, air cleaner and dehumidifier. You need perfect constant temps, humidity levels and dust control. This will not work if your garage is 85 during the day, 45 at night and dusty. Unless you like having shitty paint that is

Get a sandblaster and all sorts of paint stripping tools

Strip every bit of paint off the car down to bare metal and clean accordingly. For a measure of how long this could take, it took a friend and i a combined 30+ hours to strip his empty engine bay to paint. And we could sandblast the hell out of it, scuff, wire wheels, wire brushes, sand paper, razor blades, vaccuming, air blowing, acetone/aircraft paint stripper, you name it.

Cant stress enough how important prepping and cleaning is. Any spot where you left existing paint or primer will show a level higher in the final product.

This is an oppurtune time to fix any existing damage. Why go throygh all this if you dont?

Also an oppurtune time to do any other body modification as well. Id just get brand new unpainted bumpers and sideskirts and spoilers because theres really no way of stripping the paint off of them without destroying the plastic far as im aware. New mirror caps as well.

By now you will find that your whole car is apart might as well drop your subframe/engine and do the bay. You gotta take the doors off and strip the inside of those and the door jams on the car side.

Mask every thing off perfectly. Do not skip any part of this, you need a perfectly clean car. Keep the floor perfectly clean.

Mask a surrounding area around the car 5 ft and any direction with plastic sheets. No airholes allowed except from air cleaner/heatig/cooling ventilation.

Buy a facemask and painting suit unless you wanna paint your skin, lungs and eyes.

Buy a paintgun unless you dont want to paint your car

Buy a large (200+gal) air compressor unless you dont want to paint your car

Buy paint. High quality primer, color coat and clearcoat. Will take a few gallons of each and should cost a few hundred bucks.

Wet the floor and keep it wet throughout the process. This will capture any dust. Also another reason that humidity control is very important.

Paint the car. 70ish degrees throughout process, prime it even strokes from front to back overlapping strokes by half from top to bottom. Let dry and do again.

Then paint in similar fashion add more coats for more pop

Then clear. The more the better and the more you can polish and the deeper it will look.

Let cure for atleast a week.

Then wetsand whole car, rinse, and polish to a perfect shine

Congrats, you just painted your car in your dreams!

 

2 char

 

Thanks for all the jokes. But seriously i want to repaint it because the previous owner had the car rammed in and now i have a door and a fender taken from a dark blue g5. My car looks already bad the way it is now, so i better try to completely respray it instead of just painting those two panels. And besides i hate the white color

 

You are better off doing a $300 Macco job than painting it yourself if you are asking how to paint it...

 

This x1000

 

You should just get those 2 panels resprayed professionally. If its your first time painting then your not gonna be happy with how it comes out. Ive had my project car in the prep process for almost a year and ive still got a lot more to do. Its a very long and tedious process and any cut corners will be easily noticeable.

 

No joke from me man but my reply said you are definately much better off getting it done. I would never spray my car if it was my first time spraying,

 

X3 i wouldnt paint it another color. But since your set for it just take it to a professional and have them paint it unless you have everything to do the job correctly

 

Riceburner is pretty dead on realistically.. but I used to work in a body shop, you can paint the over clear coat if it's scuffed up, meaning DA the whole car, every inch in 320 grit until it's all the same color (different colors are different paint heights) and then paint and clear.. only real issue with doing this, is that the color you pick will be different because of the back ground color, and that doesn't mean put 20 coats of paint to bury it.. hope that helps, everything else he said was 100% accurate and the real and honest way to do it, but my old orange cobalt had ss body panels and number from blue car and I used a deep red as a base coat to hide the Blue and then painted my top coat (orange) and even up close the paint was hard to tell apart from factory paint for the trained eye let alone some shuck lol but good luck brotha

 

One of the guys here in town painted his cobalt ss with plasti dip spray cans and it didn't turn out so bad ..plus side you can peel it off. Lol.

 

what if i sand it to bare metal completely ?

 

Lol you will be doing even more work then.

 

$1.00 walmart spray paint FTW

 

^

 

If you wanna cover up different panels I'd just do plastI dip. It looks decent and it will probably last longer than a bad paint job would.

 

Wrap the panels you want to change

 

Id also just opt for plastidip honestly, go on craigslist or something there's people that will dip your car for 500 bucks any color ya want and there clearcoat for.it too just gotta be careful with bumping stuff into it for longevity reasons and its a little different to wash.

 

PLASTIDIP!!! After seeing a new color shift pearl with the DYC high gloss top coat, I was AMAZED at the difference in finish from what original plastidip looks like. Im going to do my HHR in something wild this summer.

 

I LOVE the matte white plastidip look. Looks so clean

 

I wanna plasti dip my car maybe like that i can win Fcotm lol

 

 

That car is nice I wish my car was white